Multilateral Semantic Relations Modeling for Image Text Retrieval

Image-text retrieval is a fundamental task to bridge vision and language by exploiting various strategies to fine-grained alignment between regions and words. This is still tough mainly because of one-to-many correspondence, where a set of matches from another modality can be accessed by a random query. While existing solutions to this problem including multi-point mapping, probabilistic distribution, and geometric embedding have made promising progress, one-to-many correspondence is still under-explored. In this work, we develop a Multilateral Semantic Relations Modeling (termed MSRM) for image-text retrieval to capture the one-to-many correspondence between multiple samples and a given query via hypergraph modeling. Specifically, a given query is first mapped as a probabilistic embedding to learn its true semantic distribution based on Mahalanobis distance. Then each candidate instance in a mini-batch is regarded as a hypergraph node with its mean semantics while a Gaussian query is modeled as a hyperedge to capture the semantic correlations beyond the pair between candidate points and the query. Comprehensive experimental results on two widely used datasets demonstrate that our MSRM method can outperform state-of-the-art methods in the settlement of multiple matches while still maintaining the comparable performance of instance-level matching.